Being a completely tragic Irish person who is resigned to a life of rain and drudgery, it’s always nice to look forward to getting away during the summer to my favourite places in France. Sometimes I think I live for those summer weeks.
The last 20 years have been busy. Being a wife and mother keeps a soul moving, chasing one’s tail, making sure everyone has the right schoolbooks and the right school uniforms.
It’s been a while since I stood on Ireland and truly appreciated her beauty. Enter my writing friends Serra Wildheart and EL Winters who came to spend some time here and gave me the opportunity to see my country anew.
Some of the sacred sites we travelled to, I hadn’t been to in many years. Uisneach, Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth, the Boyne Valley.
Other places like Tara, Glendalough, Dingle, and Killarney Co Kerry I visit frequently. But I had only once been in Sligo.
Sligo.
To try to gather enough superlatives to capture the level of radiance she holds is pointless. We stayed in Strandhill for just a few nights and got so see and do so much. The intrepid Serra Wildheart climbed to the very top of Knocknarea, where legend has it that under an ancient cairn, lies the remains of our very own Queen Maeve.
Our author friend Kathleen McGowan had laid out a very specific itinerary for us in Sligo and we ticked off the places one by one, our eyes coming further out on stalks at each sacred site: Yeats’ grave at Drumcliff, Gleniff Horseshoe, driving through the very sacred mountain of Benbulben, the holy well at Tobernalt, Carrowkeel, Knocknashee, where the fairies live, Glencar waterfall. There are fairies there too. They’re everywhere, really. Magical places full of ancient hidden mystery and promise. I have decided I must return and absorb more. Sligo has more to tell me.
While my mind likes to daydream and wander through the arches of the abbey at St Hilaire, climb the winding road to Rennes le Chateau and gaze out at Bugarach, saunter through the markets of Esperaza, Sommieres and the cobbled streets of medieval Pezenas, there is perhaps a deeper mediation waiting for me on my doorstep.
Maybe the grass is not always greener somewhere else?
Perhaps it comes back to my feeling that France is full of potential. I truly am very peaceful and content when I’m there and life is not always peaceful at home, is it? In France the sky is like a vast vaulted ceiling and the heavens are miles and miles away. In Ireland the sky is very down on top of you. And usually laden with clouds and a drop of rain. You don’t have to go up a very high mountain in Ireland to find yourself amidst the rolling clouds. Even on a clear-skied day of summer, the sky feels very low, as if there’s a low ceiling…and you’re trapped.
In Ireland, of course, I’m very close to the story. The story of my land and the story of my people. My very DNA is made up of these stories and I’m very married to and sculpted from the tragic history of my homeland. When I land at Dublin airport, I truly feel, “OK, the fun is over. Back to work …”.
I’m always reminded in that moment of my very psychic and sensitive American friend Michelle who said to me, “I have no idea how you live here. The stifling energy … the tragedy…” and I knew what she meant. I know it well.
Yet if someone was to ask me who I am, I’m most identified with my Irishness. Before even saying I’m a woman, a mother – I’ll tell you I’m Irish. I have, therefore, this very complicated relationship with my homeland. The hairs stand on the back of my neck for my national anthem, and as I see my tricolour flag raised. I long for the day when my country is reunited, and the rancour is left to the history books.
My Irishness is the thing I’m proudest of. And in that, I’m proudest of the resilience of my forebears. Of the rebel spirit that runs through my veins. Of the gallows humour that flows from me in times of darkness.
I abhor the whitewashing of the stories. The sycophants who manage the country like a business, trying to be the best boy in the class, pretending that we are an economic entity that is ‘doing very nicely’, instead of a complicated ancient race, with layers of pain and potential. The people in the big buildings that the British left us, who sit on the secrets and have compromised our Irishness on the world stage.
Instead, I celebrate the women and men who have told their stories of alcoholism, abuse, institutionalisation, disenfranchisement, who talk about the famine, war, poverty … because I hear those very stories whispered through my bloodline. And I hear a bigger story of vindication and acceptance of Self. I celebrate the drumming women, who reclaim Sile na gig.
Walking the land with my writing friends from this Scribe Hive was healing to me. As we were making our way through the vast lands at Uisneach, descending towards the Catstone, one of my friends said to me, “Why would my ancestors have left such a beautiful place …?”.
I instantly felt such a surge of happiness and pride in this mesmeric place I call home. And then the sorrow hit me, because of course, we know why.
This odyssey through Ireland with my friends has opened my senses to Ireland having a different story to tell the world into the future. A different story of pre-Christian druidic knowing, pre-colonisation, pre-anything. A story of integrity and clarity and magic and stamina. If I put my ear to the ground, perhaps she’ll tell it to me fully and the generations to come will express and bear witness to a beauty retold.
~ Alvagh Cronin